We will not return No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz
PRIMO LEVIWe collected in a group in front of their door, and we experienced within ourselves a grief that was new for us, the ancient grief of the people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed in every century.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses.
PRIMO LEVI -
Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.
PRIMO LEVI -
Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
PRIMO LEVI -
What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.
PRIMO LEVI -
To give a name to a thing is as gratifying as giving a name to an island, but it is also dangerous: the danger consists in one’s becoming convinced that all is taken care of and that once named, the phenomenon has also been explained.
PRIMO LEVI -
This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described.
PRIMO LEVI -
After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light.
PRIMO LEVI -
We have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone.
PRIMO LEVI -
I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer.
PRIMO LEVI -
Anyone who has obeyed nature by transmitting a piece of gossip experiences the explosive relief that accompanies the satisfying of a primary need.
PRIMO LEVI -
An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
PRIMO LEVI -
Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.
PRIMO LEVI -
There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect.
PRIMO LEVI -
At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.
PRIMO LEVI -
If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one’s desk, is a source of profound satisfaction.
PRIMO LEVI